1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information delivery systems and, particularly, to a novel, WWW/Internet-based, invoice viewing service for customers requesting information located at the remote back-end server of telecommunications service entities.
2. Background Art
Each of the major telecommunications service entities, e.g., MCI, ATandT, and Sprint, presently provides for the presentation and dissemination of customer invoice account and network management information to their customers through a Windows-based graphical user interface resident on a personal computer. Typically, service entity customers are enabled to directly dial-up, e.g., via a modem, or, alternately, via dedicated communication lines, e.g., ISDN, T-1, etc., to the entity""s application and database servers, and initiate the generation of reports of their requested account information through the reporting graphical user interface (GUI). The report requests initiated by the customer are processed by the entity""s application server, which retrieves the requested customer information from one or more databases, processes and formats the information for downloading to the client""s reporting GUI.
Most telecommunications service providers offer many different services, and many of the associated service applications have been developed independently over time, and, operate on different legacy platforms. For instance, MCI""s Service View platform (xe2x80x9cMSVxe2x80x9d) provides customers with Windows based client-server applications for customer network management and call usage analysis. These applications, run independently of one another and can only generate application specific reports one at a time. For example, applications such as the Toll Free Network Manager which generates toll free network management data reports, Perspective which generates reports on priced call detail data for usage analysis and trending, and TrafficView which generates unpriced call detail or real-time data reports, each requires a different reporting mechanism due to the nature of the data being presented. In addition, because there are little cross application interoperability and data sharing, a customer must always use the separate applications to gain access to their data including specific invoice data associated with the separate applications.
Furthermore, the implementation mechanism of individual application servers frequently relies on the native vendor-supplied listener programs and communication protocols, necessitating code changes in both the server and the workstation programs and subsequent version release, if another vendor happens to supercede the original vendor.
Therefore, it would be highly desirable to provide connectivity between legacy systems and enterprise application servers which would then provide customer connectivity over the public Internet, as the Internet provides access connectivity world wide via the TCP/IP standard, obviating a need to cater programs to specific native vendor-supplied listener programs. It would also be desirable to provide a consolidated Web-based reporting system that provides a common GUI enabling both report requesting, customizing and viewing of various types of data from different server applications in one user session. With the integrated reporting, customers will have the ability to include invoice reports on their traffic and billing reports.
Accordingly, to resolve the above shortcomings, the present invention provides a Web-based invoice viewing system for online presentation of various billing and invoice documents associated with network services provided to a customer.
The present invention is operable by a customer having at a minimum, a workstation with an off-the-shelf Web browser and an Internet access. The system of the present invention includes a client browser application typically downloaded by the Web browser over the Internet during a session initiation stage. The client browser application provides a common GUI capable of communicating securely with enterprise Intranet applications, allowing the customers access to their billing and invoice reports from anywhere and any platform in the world.
The back-end server operating in the system of the present invention maintains data from the various application services for generating and providing billing and invoice reports. In its operation, the back-end server provides an efficient storage mechanism for storing the data in the most compact format such that the storage space required for storing the data is optimized.
The system of the present invention may include a capability for enabling the customers to sum up numerical figures, such as minutes and charges, by highlighting the numbers directly on the screen displaying the document. Accordingly, the dynamic accumulator functionality may be included in the present invention for providing convenient and flexible mechanisms for obtaining totals or subtotals of numerical figures shown on a displayed document.
With the retrieved documents displayed on a workstation, a customer may print, direct batch printing to be performed remotely at an enterprise, and also fax the document to any customer specified locations. Accordingly, the present invention provides icons or menu items on a display screen for allowing customers to optionally select to print at a customer workstation, send a batch printing job to an enterprise, and also fax customer retrieved documents.
The above and additional features of the present invention are attained preferably with a Web-based invoice viewing system which enables a customer to access, view or display various invoices over the Internet. The invoices generally relate to application services, or more specifically, telecommunications services provided by an enterprise to the customer. The system of the present invention includes a client browser application located at a customer workstation, which is initially downloaded by a Web browser running in the customer workstation. The client browser application enables interactive Web-based communications with the invoice viewing system and provides an integrated interface. The present invention further includes a Java application/applet for providing the invoice viewing specific functionalities. The Java application/applet is typically invoked from the client browser application and is responsible for receiving customer requests and providing customer selected invoice documents at the customer workstation.
At the enterprise side, the present invention includes a number of web servers for managing customer sessions over the Internet. The web servers support a secure socket connection enabling encrypted communications between the client browser application and the web servers. The web servers are physically isolated and firewalled from the enterprise""s internal network (Intranet) and also from the public Internet. In addition, the web servers are typically responsible for maintaining the client browser and Java application/applets for downloading to the client workstation.
At the enterprise Intranet, the present invention includes a dispatcher for receiving encrypted transactions from the web servers and dispatching them to specific application servers, and more specifically, to the online invoicing server. The online invoicing server maintains one or more databases having image files associated with documents from various application services. The online invoicing server typically receives invoice request messages from the Java application/applet, accesses the database in response and sends response messages having requested invoice data back to the Java application/applet via the dispatcher and the web servers for presentation at the customer workstation.
Further benefits and advantages of the invention will become apparent from a consideration of the following detailed description.